No doubt the authors of the play regarded it purely as a piece of entertainment but devotees of the Theatre of the Absurd or of the Marx Brothers or of the Goons will recognise the serious principle on which it is based: that is, that once the audience has allowed itself to be beguiled into believing a single illogicality or unlikelihood, it will quickly find itself hurried, willy nilly into a bizarre world of absurdities which somehow seem both logical and credible. So here: accept a horse with a hunger for straw hats; accept a bridegroom chivalrous enough to spend his wedding day searching for straw hats; accept a few mistaken identities and a coincidence or two and soon you will share with Fadinard the wild surrealist nightmare that pursues him on his wedding night.
